On World Pneumonia Day, new technologies are helping save lives

Today is World Pneumonia Day, throwing light on a respiratory condition that’s threatening to get more acute in a world with the increasing pollution, among other things.

In medical terms, pneumonia is a form of respiratory ailment, an infection caused in the air sacs of the lungs due to various reasons. The World Health Organization blames pneumonia as the number one cause of infectious deaths in children worldwide.

According to reports, just in 2019 alone, pneumonia claimed the lives of 2.5 million, including 672,000 children. That was before the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic kicked in, which further worsened the global respiratory health situation as we all know. As a result, the estimated number of deaths from respiratory infections like pneumonia, including COVID-19, was 6 million in 2021.

Suffice to say that pneumonia is one of the most challenging respiratory conditions that humanity needs to find a way to eliminate. How is technology helping clinicians and medical researchers help reduce pneumonia-related deaths in the world?

Pneumoscope - an intelligent stethoscope

Back in November 2020, Swiss-made Pneumoscope debuted at the Geneva Health Forum – it’s an intelligent stethoscope that can diagnose pneumonia in as little as seven minutes. This pneumonia-hunting smart stethoscope is aimed at medical practitioners in low-and-middle-income countries, according to researchers.

The current Pneumoscope prototype can diagnose in just seven minutes common forms of pneumonia, one of the leading causes of death for children under the age of five, and we hope to see such new technological advancements help in the early diagnosis of pneumonia to reduce fatalities in the long term.

Sound-based AI diagnosis of pneumonia

Imagine a device running an AI algorithm trained on identifying the subtle acoustic differences of breathing through a pneumonia-infected lung versus a normal lung, for the immediate identification of pneumonia and saving lives. 

That’s exactly what the Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health study or PERCH, a project funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is currently developing across seven countries throughout Africa and Asia.  

Using digital stethoscopes to record chest sounds from children hospitalized with life-threatening pneumonia, audio signals are uploaded online and studied by co-investigators at The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health International Vaccine Access Center and the Johns Hopkins University Engineering Department. They’re in turn helping build AI algorithms that can interpret these sounds and therefore accurately diagnose childhood respiratory illness. 

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